Assessing Alterations to Planktonic Community Composition in a Changing Arctic Ocean

University Of California-San Diego Scripps Inst Of Oceanography, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Arctic Ocean is undergoing rapid environmental change, yet potential impacts on its living organisms is poorly known. Sparse observations have suggested that a shift in the composition of Arctic Ocean phytoplankton species may already be occurring. These types of shifts in the planktonic community can echo throughout the Arctic food web, affecting higher-level consumers that serve as important commercial resources or sustenance for northern communities. The proposed work will develop new optically-based tools to be used in situ and through remote sensing to understand patterns in planktonic community composition now and in the future. Graduate and undergraduate student researchers supported by this project will receive practical training in environmental science through participation in laboratory and field research, data analysis and interpretation, and numerical analyses. The investigators will conduct public outreach in collaboration with educational venues such as the Birch Aquarium at Scripps. The investigators will establish and analyze a multi-decadal baseline of observations that describes the spatial distributions of planktonic communities in the western Arctic Ocean with the goal of developing optical tools and approaches that can be broadly applied to understand future environmental change in the region. Activities include a combination of (i) field work in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas through collaboration with a Japanese research program, (ii) the development of optically-based algorithms for discerning planktonic community assemblages, and (iii) application of these algorithms to satellite remote-sensing data. The field work will include observations of planktonic community structure and connect these to seawater optical properties in the study area at different seasonal time periods. In addition, the investigators will use phytoplankton pigment measurements to infer spatial patterns of planktonic community composition and address the hypothesis that optical measurements can identify distinct planktonic assemblages. Finally, the project will develop and validate algorithms relating seawater optical properties to planktonic community structure and apply these to a time series of ocean color imagery to generate spatial maps of plankton community composition within the surface ocean. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.